Days bleed into nights, nights into days. I sleep all day because there’s nothing else to do. When I wake, I listen for something—anything—to remind me I’m not alone. But all I hear is the pounding of my heart, the whispering voices that aren’t really there.

Solitary confinement isn’t punishment; it’s decay. The mind erodes, crumbling like old brick. Studies from the early 1900s showed that isolation causes hallucinations, memory loss, even psychosis. Prisoners in the 19th-century Eastern State Penitentiary were found rocking in their cells, muttering to themselves, their minds shattered beyond repair. Modern research confirms it: without human contact, the brain rewires itself into madness.

And yet, outside these walls, isolation grows.

Once free to play stick ball in the streets and parks, children now sit behind screens, locked away in digital cells. The cold glow of a tablet has replaced the laughter of a playground. Parents, distracted, offer devices instead of conversation. Social skills fade, empathy weakens. The world outside becomes less real than the world behind thin glass.

What happens when an entire society grows up this way? When does the comfort of solitude become preferable to the discomfort of connection? Will we build a world where eye contact is obsolete, where conversation is replaced by text, where voices—real voices—become foreign and strange?

I close my eyes, pressing my palms to my ears—anything to block out the inner chatter. I think of those children, growing up in a prison without bars, never knowing what they’ve lost. I think of the men in here, broken and forgotten. Are we so different? A life without connection is no life at all.

The mind is a fragile thing, meant to exist among others. Without it, we all become prisoners of our own making.

-K